two-spacing: a rebuttal

Did I say "rebuttal?"    I mean something more like total destruction.

After the post on two-spacing and generations — which is really more about the oddness of this generation of people roughly my age, in our 40s, astride eras of analog and digital — I spent a good deal of time and energy in a fascinating conversation that included some of my best-educated friends as well as published authors.

Many of them not only used the em-quad (that is, as I've learned, the large space after a sentence, approximated by typing two spaces) but had never heard of not doing it.    One published author only changed after finding out that her editor had to take them all out;   another was completely unaware that his editor (probably) does.    Crazy!!

A friend, though, turned me on to this rather complete rebuttal, titled "Why Two Spaces After A Period Isn't Wrong (or, The Lies Typographers Tell About History)."    The author of this article makes superb points that completely devastate Manjoo's Slate article.

One thing it says is that all you have to do is, ya know, actually look at books published a while back to see that the em-quad was a standard thing for centuries, and it's really only recently that we began making that space smaller.    Further, it wasn't an aesthetic decision:   it was all mainly because of technology that made typesetting so much easier and cheaper that it couldn't be ignored, but that couldn't easily em-quad.

On reading it, I went back and checked through several of my books published before 1920.    Every single one lavishly em-quadded.    You could fit a ribeye steak between every sentence.    So there you have it.

It still looks weird to me, and the modern way of doing it still looks natural to me — so I guess we can compare it to other things like tie width, that just go in and out of fashion.    Call it a mesofashion, in that it lasts several generations.

Meanwhile, Facebook makes the decision for you.     No matter how many spaces you use, Facebook only gives you one.     So do most web environments.     Okay, then:   do you like the way all that stuff looks?    If it looks perfectly alright to you, then singling is fine.    On the other hand, if you like the look of hundred-year-old books, where there's a nice bit of real-estate after every sentence, so that you can clearly see each sentence begin, making it easy to go back and find that one great phrase you remembered, then doubling seems natural.   

It's all quite interesting, especially to see the rules of a previous age, when it seemed obvious to everyone that there should be a nice huge em-quad between sentences — which amounts to three times the size of the usual space.    You heard me:   more like three-spacing than two-spacing.    Check it out for yourself.

Best comments-section zing:   "Getting every single thing factually wrong:   paycheck.    Putting two spaces after a period:   crime."